Memory, Apology and Reconciliation

14 Pages·2008·0.21 MB·English

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Memory, Apology and Reconciliation
Michael A Murphy, University of Northern British Columbia
[email protected]

“Racism and/or paternalism also led officials to treat Aborigines as objects to be manipulated, as a
“problem” to be resolved in order to refine the planned white Australian social order.”
(Anthony Moran, ‘White Australia, Settler Nationalism and Aboriginal Assimilation,’ 178)

“The importance of the civilizing mission far outweighed issues of justice for the children.”
(Canada, Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Final Report, 371)

Introduction
Coming to terms with a legacy of historic injustice is a key political challenge for democracies
seeking a pathway to national reconciliation in the context of deep and abiding social divisions,
where trust and mutual understanding are in short supply. This is especially true for fragile
democracies seeking consolidation in the aftermath of a period of violent authoritarian rule, where
neither stability nor the emergence of a peaceful, human rights oriented public culture can be taken
for granted. South Africa’s experiment with a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (SATRC) is
perhaps the most familiar of these exercises in transitional justice, but similar efforts to marry
democratic consolidation with a measure of justice to the victims of oppression and systematic
human rights violations has rapidly become a standard feature of post-conflict transitions in strife-
torn regions of the world.1
Yet issues of historic reparation and redress are not confined to transitional democracies.
Increasingly they are finding their way onto the political agendas of relatively stable democratic
countries struggling with their own unsavoury pasts, and with a contemporary legacy of social
divisions linked to the experience, and memory, of those pasts. Among the more prominent
examples are states founded on the historic displacement and subjugation of indigenous peoples in
the Americas and Australasia. Aggressive and racially motivated assimilation policies, theft of land
and resources, violations of ancient treaties, and the denial of the most basic rights of citizenship are
among the many issues to be confronted on this difficult, and highly politicized agenda. State
responses have varied nearly as much as the challenges to be met, and have included fact-finding
and advisory missions such as the Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples or Australia’s
Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, treaty reparations commissions such as New Zealand’s
Waitangi Tribunal, agreements to repatriate cultural artefacts and human remains held in public
museum collections, and a variety of initiatives to negotiate rights to land, natural resources, self-
government and power-sharing.
My own focus in this paper is on one small, but relatively significant, element that sometimes
plays a role in broader reconciliation initiatives – official apologies. As with so many other facets of
the politics of reconciliation, the role of apology is controversial, at times strenuously resisted, and
its purpose and significance not always well understood. My intention is to provide a moral and a
practical defence of official apologies as part of a broader strategy of reconciling with historic

*Thanks to Sue Mitchell for invaluable research assistance. Financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada is gratefully acknowledged.

1 See Dyzenhaus, “Justifying the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 8 (2000): 470-96;
Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson, eds., Truth v. Justice. The Morality of Truth Commissions, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2000); and Naomi Roht-Arriaza and Javier Mariezcurrena, eds., Transitional Justice in the Twenty-First
Century. Beyond Truth Versus Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
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injustice, and to try to answer some of the more influential objections from the sceptics along the
way. The argument is constructed in relation to two case studies: the stolen generations controversy
in Australia, and the legacy of the residential school system in Canada. Both cases involved
government efforts in the 19th and early 20th centuries to reculturate indigenous children as part a
broader policy directed towards the assimilation and disappearance of traditional indigenous
communities and cultures. The arguments are intended to speak both to the specifics of these two
cases but also to the role of official apology in reconciliation politics more generally. I begin with a
brief sketch of the key facts and assumptions pertaining to reculturation policies in Australia and
Canada, followed by an even briefer account of the contemporary debates that have emerged in
both countries regarding the role and legitimacy of public apologies to the victims of these policies
and their families. Subsequent sections critically examine some of the key moral and practical
arguments for and against official apologies as a means of responding to past injustice, followed by a
brief conclusion.

Reculturation
Australia - The Stolen Generations
Among the many memories of historic injustice borne by current generations of indigenous peoples
in Australia and Canada, those linked to the coercive reculturation of indigenous children and efforts
to suppress, even destroy, indigenous languages, cultures and forms of spirituality are among the
most difficult to abide.2 In Australia, beginning in the 19th century, reculturation efforts went hand in
hand with the policy of removing indigenous children from the care and comfort of their families
and communities. Although the decentralized nature of indigenous policy making at the time
resulted in a relatively haphazard and uneven policy landscape (prior to 1967 the Australian states
had exclusive jurisdiction over indigenous affairs), by some point or another in the 19th century
Australia every state had a law on the books authorizing the removal of indigenous children from
their parents.3 The National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from
their Families was presented with evidence of child removal by a variety of means, including stealth,
deception, force, and duress.4 Children were removed to a variety of different locations, including
state sponsored industrial schools, religious missionary facilities, and orphanages, while others
(particularly half-caste girls) were placed directly under the fostership of white families. While the
exact number of children affected remains unknown, it has been estimated that from 1910 to 1970
somewhere between one in ten and one in three indigenous children were separated from their
homes and families, and that few indigenous families entirely escaped the impact of the removal
policies.5
Specific rationales for the separations varied across states and individuals but one
overarching motivation that dominated this fractured policy landscape was the conviction that
indigenous children must be prepared for entry and assimilation into white society, and that for this
to be accomplished the children needed to be removed from the backward and debilitating

2 For some first hand accounts of the impact of these policies see Canada, Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.
2007. For Seven Generations. An Information Legacy of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (CD-ROM). Ottawa: Libraxus;
and Australia, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. 1997. Bringing Them Home. National Inquiry into the
Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families. Sydney: Sterling Press.
3 See Anna Haebich. Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800-2000. (Perth: Fremantle Arts Center Press, 2000);
Bringing Them Home, 27-150; and John Chesterman and Brian Galligan, Citizens Without Rights: Aborigines and Australian
Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 24-7, 55-6, 127, and 145-9. The Commonwealth Government
was responsible for removal policies in the Northern Territory between 1911 and 1978.
4 Bringing Them Home, 5-10.
5 Ibid., 37.
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influences of their indigenous families, communities, and cultures.6 Such was the intensity of this
conviction that in some parts of Australia, simply being born indigenous was enough for a child to
be categorized as neglected and removed to an industrial school or a reformatory for purposes of
improvement.7 Authorities in favour of the removal policies were not unaware of the trauma and
suffering this inflicted on the indigenous families, but felt it was justified by the greater good of
uplifting the children from their degraded cultural surroundings and setting them on the path of
improvement and civilization. In the words of one Western Australian Parliamentarian: “…it may
appear to be a cruel thing to tear an Aborigine child from its mother, but it is necessary in some
cases to be cruel to be kind.”8 In its earlier manifestations, the denigration of indigeneity that made
this sort of callousness possible assumed both biological and eugenic dimensions. Full-blooded
Aborigines, who were generally regarded as members of an inherently and irreversibly inferior race
on its way to extinction, were to be segregated from the rest of society, for reasons which included
their own comfort and protection but also the need to prevent any further contamination of the
white race. Mixed-race Aborigines, on the other hand, meaning those whose genetic stock had been
improved through the admixture of European blood, were regarded as suitable candidates for
assimilation, hence the initial focus of the removal policies on children of mixed European and
indigenous ancestry.9 As the first Commonwealth Native Welfare Conference concluded in 1937:
“…the destiny of the natives of aboriginal origin, but not of the full blood, lies in their ultimate
absorption by the people of the Commonwealth, and it therefore recommends that all efforts be
directed to that end.”10
More controversial, even at the time, was the policy of biological absorption officially
advocated in the 1930s in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, wherein the goal was the
complete disappearance of the Aboriginal race through multiple generations of controlled
intermarriage of mixed-race Aboriginals with whites.11 As explained by Cecil Cook, Chief Protector
of Aborigines for the Northern Territory: “Generally by the fifth and invariably by the sixth
generation, all native characteristics of the Australian aborigine are eradicated. The problem of our
half-castes will quickly be eliminated by the complete disappearance of the black race, and the swift
submergence of their progeny in the white…”12 In spite of the convictions of Cook and others, in
the years following the end of the second world war an indigenous policy grounded in these sorts of
genetically-driven notions of racial hierarchy became ever more politically and scientifically

6 Bringing Them Home, 28-33; Haebich. Broken Circles, 131-56; Bain Attwood, “The Burden of the Past in the Present,” in
ed., Michelle Grattan, Reconciliation. (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2000), 257.
7 Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens Without Rights, 56. See also Van Krieken’s discussion of efforts in New South Wales
to circumvent the usual standards of child neglect in the case of indigenous children by emphasizing the importance of
the child’s ‘moral’ environment. Robert van Krieken, “Assimilation and Liberal Government,” in Tim Rowse, ed.
Contesting Assimilation. (Perth: Australia Research Institute, 2005), 40-1.
8 J. M. Drew, Parliamentary Debates, Western Australia, 1904. Cited in Bringing Them Home, 103 (see also 122, 132-3). See
also Fiona Paisley. 2005. “Mary Bennett and Chief Protector Neville: Protection, Absorption and the Future of the
Aborigines,” in Tim Rowse, ed. Contesting Assimilation. Perth: Australia Research Institute, 71-84 at 80-1.
9 Bringing Them Home, 28-33; Haebich. Broken Circles, 188-200; Robert Manne, “The Stolen Generations,” in ed., Michelle
Grattan, Reconciliation. (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2000), 129-39; Anthony Moran, “White Australia, Settler Nationalism and
Aboriginal Assimilation,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 51 (2005): 168-93, at 174-6; and Andrew Markus,
Australian Race Relations 1788-1993 (St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 77-8. The term “Aborigines” here reflects
historical usage
10 Bringing Them Home, 32; Moran, “White Australia,” 175-6; and Alison Holland. 2005. “Saving the Race: Critics of
Absorption Look for an Alternative,” in Tim Rowse, ed. Contesting Assimilation. Perth: Australia Research Institute, 85-99.
11 Moran, “White Australia,” 175-8; Fiona Paisley. 2005. “Mary Bennett and Chief Protector Neville: Protection,
Absorption and the Future of the Aborigines,” in Tim Rowse, ed. Contesting Assimilation. Perth: Australia Research
Institute, 71-84.
12 Quoted in Bringing Them Home, 137.
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unsustainable, precipitating a gradual shift away from biological towards cultural conceptions of
assimilation. What did not change was the assumption that indigenous cultures and lifeworlds were
inferior and in need of correction, and that the break-up of indigenous families could be justified as
a means of achieving this outcome.13
Policies aimed at separating indigenous children from their families, in both their biological
and cultural phases, were in fact part of a broader system of control and social engineering that
governed most aspects of indigenous life in Australia from the 19th to the late 20th century. Under
this system, basic rights and freedoms were rationed in relation to different government mandated
gradations of Aboriginality – measured either in terms of blood percentage or cultural characteristics
– while the interests of indigenous peoples were largely defined for them by non-indigenous
institutions and decision-makers. This system of control, which again had its distinctive
manifestations in the different Australian states, incorporated a bewildering array of measures
including both physical segregation and forced dispersal, denial of the franchise and property rights,
and restrictions relating to indigenous employment, mobility, intermarriage, and personal
autonomy.14 The policies sanctioned by the Northern Territory’s Aborigines Ordinance of 1918 serve as
a particularly extreme example of the type of control to which indigenous peoples could be
subjected:
“Aboriginal females were under the total control of the Chief Protector [of Aborigines]
from the moment they were born until they died unless married and living with a husband
‘who is substantially of European origin.’ To marry a non-Indigenous man they had to
obtain the permission of the Chief Protector. They could be taken from their families at
any age and placed in an institution. They could be sent out to work at a young age and
never receive wages. They had no right of guardianship over their own children who could
similarly be taken from them. Male Aborigines fared little better except that they could be
released from guardianship at 18.”15
Different policies in this broader system of control often reinforced one another in insidious ways.
For example, the dispossession and displacement of indigenous families contributed heavily to their
impoverishment and immiseration. The failure of state authorities to provide the necessary services
and funds to these displaced families and communities so that they could properly care for
themselves and their children in turn helped provide the pretext for their children to be removed on
welfare grounds.16
It was not until the 1960s and 70s that this control system and the coercive removal of
indigenous children from their families finally began to be dismantled in the face of increasing calls
for equal citizenship rights, social justice, and even self-determination for indigenous peoples. Yet
the memories and the impacts of these policies have been much more difficult to erase. The pain of
separation and, for many, the inability to re-connect or ever again to re-locate their family members
was compounded by the alienating effects of efforts to degrade and destroy indigenous cultures and

13 Markus, Australian Race Relations, 163-6; Moran, “White Australia,” 178-93. As Moran notes, not all advocates of
assimilation argued for the complete erasure of indigenous cultures, though they generally shared the conviction as to
their inferiority. For an interesting overview of the many complexities attending the assimilation of indigenous peoples in
Australia see Tim Rowse, “Contesting Assimilation,” in Tim Rowse, ed. Contesting Assimilation, 1-24.
14 See Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens Without Rights, 43-57, 84-155; Anna Haebich, “Nuclear, Suburban and Black:
Middleton’s Vision of Assimilation for Nyungar Families,” in Tim Rowse, ed. Contesting Assimilation, 201-20; and
Geoffrey Gray, “From Nomadism to Citizenship: A.P. Elkin and Aboriginal Advancement,” in Nicolas Peterson and
Will Sanders, eds., Citizenship and Indigenous Australians: Changing Conceptions and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998), 55-76.
15 Bringing Them Home, 133-4.
16 See Bringing Them Home, 33, 80-81, 112-13, 143-4, 266-7; Haebich, Broken Circles, 27-31, 127-30, 136-7, 168, 205-6, 420-
1, 552.
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languages, by the exposure of many children to physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, and by the
failure of authorities to uphold their most basic duties of care by providing for the proper housing,
sustenance, health and education of the children over whom they had assumed guardianship.17
Evidence suggests that the effects of removal and reculturation were not only immediate but also
long-term and inter-generational, and have been linked to many of the rampant and persistent social
pathologies visible in indigenous communities in Australia, an experience that in significant ways
mirrors that of indigenous peoples in Canada coping with the legacy of the residential school
system.18

Canada - Residential Schools
The signature tool for effecting the reculturation and assimilation of indigenous children in Canada
was the residential school. It is believed that somewhere between 90,000 and 150,000 indigenous
children attended the schools, whose tenure began in the early nineteenth century, with the last
school closing its doors in 1996. Attendance was voluntary at first, although pressure tactics such as
the withholding of rations from parents and other forms of duress were not unheard of.
Compulsory attendance was legislated for the first time in 1894, and these measures were gradually
strengthened so that by 1930 indigenous children could be sent to boarding schools and kept there
until the age of 18.19 The primary function of the schools, in the words of one former Minister of
Indian Affairs, was to “elevate the Indian from his condition of savagery…and make him a self-
supporting member of the state, and eventually a citizen in good standing.”20 As in Australia, this
also meant cleansing the children of the inferior and uncivilized cultures and traditions transmitted
to them by their parents and communities, so that they might be elevated to a higher standard of
cultural and human functioning.21 In most cases the children were required to attend on-reserve day
schools, but others were physically separated from their families and communities in distant
boarding schools.22 In Canada too the trauma of separation often failed to dissuade supporters of
such policies such as Hector Langevin, a minister in the second MacDonald government, who
concluded before Parliament: “If these schools are to succeed, we must not place them too near the
bands; in order to educate the children properly we must separate them from their families. Some
people may say that this is hard, but if we want to civilize them, we must do that.”23
Like the removal policies in Australia, the residential schools were part of a more
comprehensive regime of paternalistic manipulation and control, whose ultimate aim was the
extinction of traditional indigenous languages, cultures, and communities and, by extension, the

17 Bringing Them Home, 75, 135-8. 259-65, 153-68; Manne, “The Stolen Generations; Paisley, “Mary Bennett and Chief
Protector Neville,” 76.
18 Bringing Them Home, 222-32.
19 Olive Dickason. Canada’s First Nations: a history of founding peoples from earliest times (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1991), 301-11; J.R. Miller. Shingwauk’s Vision. A History of Native Residential Schools. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1996), 168-70.
20 Canada, Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), Final Report, Volume 1(Ottawa: Minister of Supply and
Services, 1996), 333. See also Dickason. Canada’s First Nations, 309-10; and Miller. Shingwauk’s Vision, 184-5.
21 John L Tobias, “Protection, Civilization, Assimilation: An Outline History of Canada’s Indian Policy,” in ed., J.R.
Miller, Sweet Promises. A Reader on Indian-White Relations in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 127-41 at
127, 136; RCAP, Final Report, 338-9. Not everyone was convinced that indigenous children were capable of shedding
their uncivilized ways. As Olive Dickason reports, Clifford Sifton, Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs in 1896, felt
the residential schools to be a waste of time because Indians lacked “the physical, mental or moral get-up” to be an equal
match for whites (Dickason. Canada’s First Nations, 310).
22 J. R. Miller. Lethal Legacy. Current Native Controversies in Canada. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2004), 245;
Dickason. Canada’s First Nations, 310; RCAP, Final Report, 334-7.
23 Quoted in Miller, Lethal Legacy, 244-5.
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elimination of the government’s fiscal and political responsibility for its Indian wards who, it was
expected, would ultimately be absorbed into the general population. Specific aspects of this control
system included government mandated definitions of indigeneity that governed access to different
rights and entitlements, the displacement of indigenous communities onto reserves and the
suppression of their systems of self-government by the dictates of the Indian Act, prohibitions on
traditional cultural practices, manipulation and denial of voting rights, limitations on rights of
residence and mobility, and a variety of other restrictions on their civil rights and basic human
freedoms.24 Residential schools and this broader system of domination were similarly grounded in
influential pseudo-scientific theories of racial hierarchy wherein the inferiority of indigenous peoples
and cultures was assumed as a matter of course.25 Whereas Canada seems to have been more
influenced by the comparatively less rigid cultural as opposed to the biological notion of racial
inferiority that dominated earlier indigenous policy in Australia, one still encountered (though by no
means universally) the assumption that adults were incapable of intellectual or moral progress, even
under state tutelage. Children, on the other hand, were generally regarded as suitable objects for
reculturation and as such were the key to government’s plans for a fully civilized and assimilated
indigenous future.26
Within the walls of the residential schools, children were faced with a determined effort,
often coercively enforced, to devalue and ultimately eradicate their languages, cultures, and forms of
spirituality. One of the many tragic effects of these measures was that children frequently emerged
from the schools with a sense of being caught between two cultures, neither fully at home nor fully
accepted in either, and profoundly alienated as a result.27 At the same time there is evidence which
suggests that the schools failed to fulfill even the elementary function of providing the children with
a decent education, that teachers were poorly-trained and ill-equipped, that in too many cases
students spent more time engaged in activities other than classroom studies, and that the goal of
education frequently took a back seat to budgetary concerns.28 Moreover, in yet another grim
parallel with the Australian history of child removal, evidence has emerged that those responsible for
the schools were derelict in their most basic responsibility to look after the safety and well-being of
the children under their care. The government’s own reports at the time indicate that overcrowding,
inadequate provision of clothing and nourishment, poor sanitation, and substandard buildings that
were poorly heated contributed directly to the ill-health and mortality of scores of children. 29
Particularly virulent was the threat of tuberculosis, which in some schools claimed the lives of more
than half of the students who passed through their doors.30 More disturbing yet, this health crisis
was greeted by the Canadian government with what can only be referred to as criminal disregard. In
spite of detailed and repeated reports from their own inspectors and medical officials as to the

24 Richer accounts of these policies and their underlying motivations can be found in Darlene Johnston, ‘First Nations
and Canadian Citizenship’ in William Kaplan, ed., Belonging: The Meaning and Future of Canadian Citizenship (Montreal &
Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1996), 349-67; John .S. Milloy, “The Early Indian Acts: Developmental Strategy and
Constitutional Change,” in J.R. Miller, ed., Sweet Promises, 145-54; Tobias, “Protection, Civilization, Assimilation,” 127-41;
and RCAP, Final Report, 255-332.
25 Miller, Lethal Legacy, 228-30; RCAP, Final Report, 337-8. See also James Tully, “Rediscovering America: The Two
Treatises and Aboriginal Rights,” in James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 137-171.
26 RCAP, Final Report, 338.
27 Dickason, Canada’s First Nations, 311-12; Miller, Lethal Legacy, 246-7, 252-3; RCAP, Final Report, 340, 374-5.
28 Dickason, Canada’s First Nations, 310-11; RCAP, Final Report, 344-6; Miller, Miller. Shingwauk’s Vision, 418-19.
29 See the report by the Chief Medical Officer of Indian Affairs. P.H. Bryce. The Story of a National Crime. (Ottawa: James
Hope and Sons, 1922).
30 Dickason, Canada’s First Nations, 310-11; RCAP, Final Report, 353-8; Bill Curry and Karen Howlett, “Natives died in
droves as Ottawa ignored warnings,” Globe and Mail, Tuesday, April 24, 2007, http://www.theglobeandmail.com.
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nature and scale of this human tragedy, reports whose contents the government fully accepted, for
decades it failed to take serious remedial action or even to launch a comprehensive investigation into
the problem.31 The sad history of physical and sexual abuse of students at the residential schools
produced a similar record of callous government intransigence, and as in Australia the effects have
proven to be long-term and intergenerational, and have contributed heavily to the cycle of social ills
and dysfunction that plague so many indigenous communities across Canada. 32

The Politics of Apology
Through the persistent efforts of survivors, indigenous organizations, and high-profile public
inquiries the nature and impacts of the child removal and residential school policies have acquired
increasing public attention in Australia and Canada, leading many to call for an apology and various
forms of compensation and redress. I will focus mainly on the issue of apology, which has been
greeted with both ambivalence and resistance in both countries. In Canada, Conservative Prime
Minister Brian Mulroney, whose government established the Royal Commission that helped shed so
much light on the residential schools and their legacy, distinguished himself by studiously avoiding
an apology for this chapter in Canadian history, despite the willingness of his government to
apologize for the harsh treatment of Japanese and Italian Canadians during the second world war.33
His Liberal successor as Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien, proved if anything even more averse to the
symbolic politics of apology. As part of its response to the RCAP report, his government produced
a Statement of Reconciliation, which acknowledged Canada’s role in the development and administration
of the residential school system and the role these institutions played in separating families and
interfering with the transmission of indigenous languages and cultures. It further acknowledged that
many student in the schools were exposed to physical and sexual abuse, and to those who victimized
in this way the government extended its apology.34
Chrétien, however, chose not to lend the symbolic weight of his office, let alone his
presence, to the occasion, delegating the responsibility instead to Minister of Indian Affairs Jane
Stewart who delivered the statement in a lunch hour ceremony on Parliament hill. Neither was the
statement granted the solemnity of a formal and public delivery in the House of Commons, in stark
contrast with the recent apology offered by the Australian government for its role in the stolen
generations controversy. In substantive terms, moreover, the apology appeared to extend only to
those who suffered the effects of physical and sexual abuse, excluding among others those children
who were forcibly separated from their parents, the children who died preventable deaths from
tuberculosis, and the parents whose presumed cultural and moral inferiority lay at the foundation of
the government’s reculturation policies.
The symbolic and substantive shortcomings of the Chrétien government’s exercise in
contrition undoubtedly has contributed to the more recent calls for a fresh apology from Stephen
Harper’s Conservatives. 35 The Harper government has followed a somewhat schizophrenic path on

31 RCAP, Final Report, 356-8, 365.
32 Ibid., 365-79.
33 RCAP, Final Report, 381; Matt James, “Wrestling With the Past: Apologies, Quasi-Apologies, and Non-Apologies in
Canada,” in Mark Gibney, et al. eds., The Age of Apology. Facing Up to the Past (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press), 139-42.
34 Canada. “Statement of Reconciliation. Learning From the Past,” Delivered 7 January, 1998, Ottawa. Indian and
Northern Affairs Web Site, http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca, accessed 31 July, 2007. The statement was accompanied by a
$350 million ‘healing fund.’
35 The Liberal statement had both its critics and supporters. See James, “Wrestling With the Past,” 141; Annette
Bourgeois, “Inuit Leaders Praise Stewart’s Statement,” Nunatsiaq News, January 16, 1998, http://nunanet.com. One
prominent supporter was Phil Fontaine, head of the Assembly of First Nations. More recently Fontaine has actively
pressed the Harper Conservatives for a fresh apology.
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the question of official apologies. Its willingness to apologizes for shameful historic events such as
the Chinese Canadian Head Tax stood in sharp contrast with the initial refusal to do the same in
relation to the residential schools. According to Jim Prentice, Minister of Indian Affairs at the time,
“Many things happened that we need to close the door on as part of Canadian history, but
fundamentally, the underlying objective [of the residential schools] had been to try and provide an
education to aboriginal children and I think the circumstances are completely different from…the
Chinese head tax.”36 Once the story of the tuberculosis tragedy made public headlines, however, the
Conservatives rapidly shifted their position, committing themselves both to an official apology and
to the creation of a South African style Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an idea launched
under the leadership of the Paul Martin Liberals. Initially this apology was to be delivered once the
commission had completed its work in 4-5 years, but this decision too was subsequently reversed
with the Conservative promising in mid-April that an apology was just weeks away.37
In Australia, a similar but more intensely politicized debate gained momentum in the 1990s
over whether the Commonwealth government should officially apologize for its part in the stolen
generations controversy.38 The stiffest resistance came from former Prime Minister John Howard,
who deplored what he often referred to as exercises in ‘black armband history’ which he felt
overemphasized the darker chapters in Australia’s past. Although willing to express his personal
sorrow for the suffering and personal tragedies linked to the removal policies, and to declare the
past treatment of indigenous Australians “the most blemished chapter in our history,” he resolutely
refused all calls for an official public apology.39 In response to his many critics, Howard declared
that current generations of Australians should not be held responsible and accountable for the
actions of previous generations. He also voiced his reticence to pass judgement on those whose
actions, harmful though they may appear in retrospect, were mostly benevolent in intent, and were
fully sanctioned by the legal and moral standards of the day.40
In lieu of a formal apology, the government offered an expression of “deep and sincere
regret that Indigenous Australians suffered injustices under the practices of past generations, and for
the hurt and trauma that many Indigenous people continue to feel as a consequence of those
practices.”41 The credibility of this carefully crafted non-apology was further diminished when the
Commonwealth Government, in its submission to a Senate Inquiry looking into question of
compensation for the stolen generations, cast doubt on whether a sufficient number of indigenous
children were taken to justify use of the term stolen ‘generation’, challenged the evidence of forcible
removal of children as mostly anecdotal, and re-asserted its view that the treatment of children was

36 No residential school apology, Tories say Globe and Mail, 27 March, 2007, http://www.theglobeandmail.com, accessed
27 March, 2007.
37 Bill Curry, “Don't politicize apology for residential schools, natives say," Globe and Mail, April 17, web edition,
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/, accessed 13 May 2008. The Tories now say that the apology will be delivered on 11
June 2008.
38 In contrast, each of the Australian state governments moved quickly to offer official public apologies for their part in
the history of indigenous child removal.
39 John Howard. 1997. Speech at the Opening Ceremony of the Australian Reconciliation Convention, Melbourne, 26
May.
40 John Howard, Motion of Reconciliation, Hansard, Australian House of Representatives, Thirty-Ninth Parliament,
First Session, Fourth Period, 26 August 1999, p. 9207; Australia, “Commonwealth Government Response to the Council
for Aboriginal Reconciliation Final Report - Reconciliation : Australia's Challenge. (Canberra: Commonwealth of
Australia, 2002), 10.
41 Australia, “Commonwealth Government Response,” 2.
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‘essentially lawful and benign in intent’.42 For these reasons, few held any hope that an apology
would be forthcoming on Howard’s watch.
Succeeding Howard as Prime Minister in 2008 was incoming Labor leader Kevin Rudd who,
in a dramatic break with the Howard era, promised that an official apology to the stolen generations
would be the first order of business for his new government. True to his word, before the Australian
House of Representatives on 13 February of 2008 Rudd delivered a full and frank apology for the
removal policies, for the pain and suffering incurred by members of the stolen generations and their
families, and for the degrading treatment of indigenous languages and cultures. He further
acknowledged that the fundamental objective of the removal policies, grounded in notions of
cultural and racial superiority, was to remove all traces of the black race from the Australian body
politic – facts which in his government’s view were difficult to square with the allegedly benign
intent of these policies.43 Rudd’s gesture was widely applauded both at home and abroad, and
offered a sliver of hope that a new era of state-indigenous relations was afoot in Australia. Yet in
spite of the solemnity, the generosity, and the fullness of this apology, doubts continued to be
expressed as to its value and to the significance of its contribution to the broader reconciliation
agenda in Australia. Some of these doubts stem from the Commonwealth’s ongoing refusal to
consider monetary compensation for the removal policies and the sense of enduring injustice this
may generate among survivors.44 Questions also remain about the depth and character of the
opposition’s vote in supporting the motion of apology,45 while others wonder whether an official
apology may not be a step backward for practical reconciliation by reinforcing a culture of
victimhood amongst indigenous Australians rather than a sense of empowerment and assertive
agency.46
The concerns and misgivings expressed in the Australian and Canadian debates over historic
reculturation policies are a microcosm of the sorts of issues that are frequently raised in wider
political and academic debates over public apology,47 and have an important role to play not only in
shaping political and public opinion on the appropriateness of public apologies, but also on the form
and substance of the apologies that may be forthcoming. In the sections that follow I seek to

42 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio National. 2000. Transcripts from Background Briefing, “Stolen
Generations,” Sunday, July 2. http://www.abc.net.au/, accessed 24/09/2007.
43 Kevin Rudd. 2008. Motion: Apology To Australia’s Indigenous Peoples, Official Hansard, Australian House of
Representatives, 42nd Parliament, 13 February. http://www.aph.gov.au/house/index.htm, accessed 15 April ,2008.
44 See Noel Pearson, “When words aren't enough,” The Australian, February 12, 2008, web edition,
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/, accessed 17 April 2008; to date only the government of Tasmania has offered
compensation to victims of the removal policies.
45 Howard’s successor Brendan Nelson deserves a great deal of credit for delivering the opposition’s support for the
apology, but his speech before the house provoked significant anger and criticism for emphasizing the benevolent
intentions behind the removal policies, and for failing to engage with the assumptions of racial and moral superiority to
which they were linked. See Brendan Nelson. 2008. Response to Motion: Apology To Australia’s Indigenous Peoples,
Official Hansard, Australian House of Representatives, 42nd Parliament, 13 February.
http://www.aph.gov.au/house/index.htm, accessed 15 April ,2008. Nelson’s apparent ambivalence to an apology is also
detectable amongst a sizeable portion of the Australian public. See the polling data compiled in Australia. 2000.
Reconciliation: Australia's Challenge. Final report of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation to the Prime Minister and the
Commonwealth Parliament. (Canberra: Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation), 31-5; and in Murray Goot and Tim
Rowse, Divided Nation? Indigenous Affairs and the Imagined Public. (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007), 3-10, 128-
60.
46 One of the most vocal exponents of this position is Noel Pearson, an influential indigenous leader from Cape York.
See Pearson, “When words aren't enough.”
47 See, for example, Jeffrey Simpson’s concerns over the rise of an ‘apology industry’ in Canada. Jeffrey Simpson, “Sorry
to say, but the apology-seeking industry is thriving,” Globe and Mail, web edition, 20 May 2008,
http://www.theglobeandmail.com, accessed 20 May 2008.
10
address some of these concerns in the process of constructing a defence of public apology on both
moral and practical grounds.

Apology – The Moral Case
Perhaps the most central moral functions of apology is the act of recognition. An official apology in
the first instance it is a simple recognition and acknowledgement of what happened in the past, of
the forces that led to the events, and of the human impacts of those events.48 In Australia and
Canada this means an acknowledgement not only of the policies of removal and reculturation, but
also of the racist assumptions by which they were underpinned. It means acknowledging the wilful
neglect on the part of officials that exposed so many children to physical and sexual abuse, and in
the worst cases to premature mortality, and the long-term and intergenerational psycho-social legacy
of these abuses.49 On a deeper level, official apologies serve to recognize the injustice of past events
– that individuals were not only harmed, but wrongfully so.50 In this sense, following Levy, apologies
simultaneously function as an act of “official memorialization, the committing to public memory, of
the wrong.”51 Full and frank apologies should acknowledge both the injustice of particular actions or
events e.g. coercive removals, abuse, and neglect, but also the structural or systemic injustice that
legitimated these actions. In Australia and Canada means the broader system of control and
manipulation wherein indigenous peoples were viewed as racial-cultural subordinates or as inferior
examples of humanity. This systemic injustice made it possible for the dignity, well-being and even
the survival of indigenous children to be treated with callous, even criminal, disregard. It also made
it possible for the moral agency of the parents to be denigrated or denied, via the assumption that
they were incapable of properly raising and educating their children. Moreover, as Raymond Gaita
has argued, it also made it possible to assume that indigenous peoples could not be harmed or
emotionally scarred to the same extent as their white masters and protectors.52
Apology as an exercise in recognition and memorialization is simultaneously an important
means of paying respect to the victims of past injustice (both the living and the deceased) and to
those who carry with them the difficult memories of the injustices perpetrated against their
ancestors.53 Understood in these terms, official apologies are a means of reaffirming the equal moral
status and dignity that was denied to the victims of injustice, and serve as a formal expression of our
desire to break with the unjust practices and assumptions of our political predecessors.54 A refusal to
apologize, on the other hand, adds insult to injury by signalling an indifference to past injustice and
to the harms and indignities suffered by those who were victimized, and as such can be profoundly

48 Attwood, “The Burden of the Past,” 257-8.
49 On this dimension of recognition, Australia’s apology to the stolen generations was clearly superior to Canada’s
statement on the residential schools.
50 Chandran Kukathas. 2003. “Responsibility for Past Injustice: How to Shift the Burden. Politics, Philosophy and Economics
2: 165-90, at 172; Duncan Ivison, Postcolonial Liberalism. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 100.
51 Jacob T. Levy. The Multiculturalism of Fear. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 242. See also Meredith Gibbs,
“Apology and Reconciliation in New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi Settlement Process,” in Gibney, et al. eds., The Age of
Apology, 163.
52 Raymond Gaita. A Common Humanity. (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 120-1. As in the oft-quoted words of
inspector James Isdell (Western Australia): “I would not hesitate for one moment to separate any half-caste from its
aboriginal mother, no matter how frantic her momentary grief might be at the time. They soon forget their offspring.”
Quoted in Bringing Them Home, 104.
53 Following Kukathas, “Responsibility for Past Injustice,” (173), honouring the deceased victims of past injustice also
has an important function in providing comfort to their descendents.
54 See David Dyzenhaus, “Justifying the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 8: 470-
96, at 473-4; Elazar Barkan. 2006. “Historical Reconciliation. Redress, Rights and Politics,” Journal of International Affairs,
60(1): 1-15, at 8-9; and Richard Vernon. 2003. “Against Restitution,” Political Studies, 51: 542-57, at 5454-6.